Making Choices Between Love and Money

DAVE MURPHY

Published 4:00 am, Friday, March 23, 2001

A career book called "The Monk and the Riddle" came out about a year ago, when the economy was still rosy, but it might hit home for a lot more people now, when dot-com stock options are sleeping with Amelia Earhart's plane.

Although authors Randy Komisar and Kent Lineback base their tale on how Komisar has helped technology startups get established, the book could help budding entrepreneurs from any industry -- and anyone who has chosen a career based on money rather than enjoyment.

Lenny and Allison, who want to create a startup called Funerals.com. Lenny knows that selling caskets and making funeral arrangements over the Internet are hardly his dream, but the money would allow him to do the other things he has planned for the rest of his life.

"There's nothing wrong with cashing out and making a lot of money," Komisar tells him, "unless those 'other things' you intend to get to are what you'd rather be doing all along.

"My experience tells me if you do this for the money, you'll just end up howling at the moon. The money's never there until it's there. There must be something more, a purpose that will sustain you when things look bleakest. Something worthy of the immense time and energy you will spend on this, even if it fails."

Have you ever been watching a favorite show on television when your spouse or child or some other loved one says something, and you just kind of say "uh- huh" without exactly processing what the person is saying? That's what techies might have done with "The Monk and the Riddle" a year ago.

Should they have paid more attention? Uh-huh.

In a sense, all the dot-com madness was like the legal version of a pyramid scheme. The people who came up with the ideas and sold others on them might have come out with a ton of money, but those farther down the pyramid ran into a wall of nonbelievers. They expected the mother lode and got a different sort of load -- from a different sort of mother.

Certainly you can't be oblivious to money when you're choosing a career. (Old joke: What do you call a person with master's degrees in both history and philosophy? A waiter.) But if money is the only reward your career has to offer, you're setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment.

Techies are hardly the only ones to run into this. People have gone into careers in business or finance or law, then found their frustrations outweighed their rewards.

On the other hand, a lot of dot-commers are perfectly happy with their careers even if they can't retire at 35. "This is an industry that's changing the world," they might have said to themselves, "and I want to be a part of it. "

When I was younger, I wrote a couple of books but could never get them published. Do I regret that they never made me so rich that I could now be rolling around naked in a pile of $100 bills instead of sucking exhaust on the Bayshore Freeway? Hell yes.

But do I regret the time I "wasted" on them? Hell no. They taught me a lot, and I had fun doing them.

Despite all the gloom from layoffs and stock market woes, the Internet still is changing the world. Talented techies who want to be a part of it will have great opportunities for decades.

But their chances of striking gold are about as good as, well, their chances of striking gold. Those who got into it with the idea of retiring at 35 are likely to find themselves so bitter, whiny and cynical that the only job they'll be qualified for is newspaper columnist.

An even bigger danger is for those who have already been burned: people in their 20s who put in 80- or 90-hour workweeks, only to find themselves with pink slips and underwater stock options. They might never approach work with the same sort of passion again.

In some ways, that's healthy. Their lives were so far out of balance that it was scary. A slap in the face from reality might work wonders.

On the other hand, your 20s are a bit early to let your inner cynic take over. If you're a disgruntled dot-commer who chose your career based on money instead of pleasure, it's not too late to re-evaluate.

Talented people whose careers bring them joy will usually find a way to make a good living. That goes for history majors and philosophy majors -- and waiters.

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People in dead-end industries who get laid off tend to leap at the first job offer they get rather than asking themselves some bigger questions: Do they really want to stay in the industry? Have things changed so much that it is no longer worthwhile? Have they lost whatever passion they had?

Technology is far from being a dead-end industry, but techies need to ask themselves the same questions.

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